One might note in passing that Gide is making a concerted e√ort to establish not only that homosexuality is no sign of weakness or decadence (given its links to military force), but also that the homosexual—Corydon in this particular case—is deeply patriotic. Corydon ‘‘trembled’’ for his nation and says ‘‘us’’ when he speaks of his endangered land. This idea is discreetly added on to the major thread of the argument, and for once Gide does not insist on it with a heavy hand, but instead lets it be suggested in the words he chooses. Yet this is still clearly a way of responding to one of the loudest themes of homophobic discourse—that the gay man is a traitor to his nation.
This was a frequent accusation during the German scandals Gide alludes to at the beginning of his book: all the military men implicated in the Eulenburg trials in and after 1908 were accused in this way. The diplomat himself was known for his pacifist and pro-French views.∞∂ This theme of treason will culminate in the fantasy of the ‘‘Homintern’’ (a play of words on ‘‘Ko-mintern,’’ the Communist International) that would develop in England in the 1920s and 1930s.∞∑ Gide himself, despite everything he says in Corydon, would not be spared the accusation. He would rapidly be accused of sapping the strength of the nation (‘‘How the Germans must be laughing at us!’’) and, in 1940, of being responsible for the defeat of the French Army because of his corrupting influence on French youth and his contribution to the ruin of morality, social values, and so on.∞∏
Corydon thus contains nearly all the themes that characterized the texts John Addington Symonds wrote. It isn’t possible to give a complete cata-logue, but the third and fourth dialogues of Corydon present one after the other all the arguments Symonds had o√ered. One might di√erentiate the two by saying that the misogyny of Gide’s text is more salient than in the works of his predecessors. For instance, in praising the artistic flourishing characteristic of ancient Greece and the Renaissance, Gide writes: ‘‘And
≤≤≠
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f when someone decides to write a history of uranism in its relation to the plastic arts, it is not during the decadent periods that it will be observed to flourish, but quite the contrary, in the glorious and healthy epochs. . . .
Conversely, it seems to me that not invariably but frequently the exaltation of women in the plastic arts is the index of decadence’’ (87–88).∞π
But the guiding thread of Gide’s argument, like that of his predecessors, consists in emphasizing the contradiction between the admiration for Greek culture and the refusal to see the essential link between its artistic greatness and the sexual customs that enabled that greatness:
Do you refuse to understand that there exists a direct relation between the flower and the plant which bears it, between the essential quality of its sap and its behavior and its economy? . . . As soon as Greek morals are mentioned, they are deplored, and since they cannot be ignored,
they are turned from in horror; we do not understand, or we pretend
not to understand; we refuse to admit that they form an integral part of the whole, that they are indispensable to the functioning of the social organism, and that without them the fine flower we admire would be
quite di√erent, or would not be at all. (106–07)
These observations once again recall the earnest e√orts of Symonds to set aside ‘‘luxury’’ and to limit masculine loves to the form of pedagogic relations. As an intellectual relation, homosexuality is acceptable; as a sexual relation it is reprehensible. Corydon comes back to emphasize this point at the end of the book: ‘‘I am saying that this love, if it is authentic, tends toward chastity . . . and that for the child it can be the best incentive to courage, to exertion, to virtue’’ (124). The older lover might even cure the younger of a taste for masturbation: ‘‘I am also saying that an older man can understand an adolescent boy’s troubles better than a woman can, even one expert in the art of love; indeed, I know certain children excessively addicted to solitary pleasures, for whom I consider this kind of attachment would be the surest remedy’’ (124). Further, for the young man (whom Gide deprives of all desire and of all sexuality: ‘‘more desirable and desired than desiring’’), nothing, Gide insists, could be preferable than ‘‘a lover of his own sex. . . . I believe that such a lover will jealously watch over him, protect him, and himself exalted, purified by this love, will guide him toward those radiant heights which are not to be reached without love. I believe that if, quite the contrary, this youth should fall into a woman’s hands, this can be disastrous for him’’ (125). This relation of the lover to his beloved will last ‘‘from
m o m e n ta ry p l e a s u r e s
≤≤∞
thirteen to twenty-two,’’ because that is ‘‘for the Greeks the age of loving friendship, of shared exaltation, of the noblest emulation.’’ And it is only after this clearly initiatory period that the boy will want to become a man, which means to turn his thoughts ‘‘to women—which is to say: to marry’’
(125–26).
One more important point needs to be made. The third dialogue of
Corydon is presented as a response to a book by Léon Blum: On Marriage. Gide opposes to the sexual liberty that Blum seems to support for women (and which earned him as many insults as Gide would earn for Corydon) a serious e√ort to protect young women. If one is to believe what he writes, there is no doubt that for Gide, the fate of a young girl is to become a wife and provide children to her husband and to society. It goes without saying that under ideal circumstances she will remain a virgin until her wedding. But, given that ‘‘the male has much more to expend than is required in order to answer to the reproductive function of the opposite sex and to ensure the reproduction of the species’’ (104), there needs to be a way for surplus male desire to express itself. This is where pederasty comes in. In order to avoid directing
‘‘the anxiety and excess of our male appetites’’ at young women, Corydon suggests, we would do well to return to the ‘‘solution’’ that ‘‘ancient Greece advocated’’ (105). ‘‘If you merely consider the fact that, given our morals,’’
Corydon adds, ‘‘no literature has devoted so much attention to adultery as the French; not to mention all the semi-virgins and all the semi-prostitutes.
This outlet the Greeks proposed, which outrages you and which seemed so natural to them, you want to suppress. Then make your saints; or else man’s desire will corrupt the wife, defile the daughter . . .’’ (110).
In Gide’s world, women ideally would have no desire (unless they want to be described as ‘‘prostitutes’’). But Gide has to admit that adultery, even if it arises from the excesses of male desire, can only take place with the help of women who have set aside their role as spouse (or, worse, with the help of young women, ‘‘semi-virgins,’’ who are willing to engage in debauchery). So
‘‘pederasty’’ would function not only to protect young women from men, but also to protect them from themselves, to shelter them from male desire and thereby restore the morality of the larger society.
It is all too easy simply to laugh at the way Gide, in his apology for pederasty, portrays bourgeois society’s desire to protect the virtue of its daughters and its wives. Maybe we should stop at pointing out certain blatant contradictions, such as the one between the idea that pederasty will serve as an outlet for excess male desire and the idea that the relations
≤≤≤
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f between the older and the younger man will be chaste. Coherence was
probably not what Gide was aiming for. Homophobic discourse itself hardly cares about it. It is riddled with contradictions. Its coherence is that it is consistently homophobic. Likewise, gay discourse is not particularly coherent and historically has never been so. A single book can easily harbor contradictory arguments. The coherence of the heterogenous assertions lies in the will toward legitimation that animates the enti
re discourse.
11
The Will to Disturb
In Corydon, then, homosexuality per se is never really brought up. This is first of all because sexuality itself is rarely brought up (except to condemn it). It is also because relationships between grown men are never really brought up (except so that one can be o√ended by them). The ‘‘defense of pederasty’’
that the book announces at the outset unfolds imperturbably with reference to the Greeks and to relations between an older man and a younger one, an adolescent. The book presents a fantastical project for social reform that would consist in reinstating an institution that existed in antiquity. Its contents do not include anything that could be thought of as a defense of homosexuality. The younger man, in any case, is destined for heterosexuality, or at least for the marriage that will mark his full transition to manhood. Will he, in his turn, take up the role of the older man, turning his attention to male adolescents, leaving to his wife the job of raising their children and managing their household? That would seem to be the expectation, but we cannot really be sure, for the dialogue ends abruptly at the point at which this might be discussed: the narrator picks up his hat and leaves without pursuing the subject further.
Of course, it can be observed that many of the positions taken in the third and fourth of Corydon’s dialogues are in contradiction with what was discussed in the first two dialogues (which had been written much earlier). At the beginning of the volume, Gide had rejected the idea that homosexuality could be ‘‘acquired’’ by an individual (an idea that meant, in the medical and moral discourses of the time, that it could also be unlearned or even prevented). His intention was to show that homosexuality is grounded in the nature of certain people. He repeatedly a≈rms that he has no intention of convincing anyone to become homosexual. He is simply speaking out in
order to lessen the burden of opprobrium under which those who are homo-
≤≤∂
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f sexual have heretofore been obliged to su√er. Yet if this is the case, why would he, at the end of the book, produce the elaborate theoretical and historical construction having to do with a return to pederasty—a social institution that would involve all young men of a certain age, an institution in which doubtless all older men would be intended to take care of the younger men?
Perhaps the reason is that Gide’s discourse is entirely under the influence of the homophobic violence against which he wishes to fight. The entire discourse that Gide has his spokesman Corydon express is devoted to responding to di√erent homophobic themes: e√eminacy, sickness, decadence, and the betrayal of one’s own nation. By organizing his discourse in this way, Gide not only defines what he has to say by reference to those categories, he internalizes them. Far from managing to do away with the terms imposed by homophobic discourse, far from rising up against homophobic habits of thought, he in fact accepts and reproduces them. The best he can do is to try to make an exception for ‘‘pederasts’’ and to include himself in that category.
The ‘‘defense of pederasty’’ sets itself up by making a distinction between noble and unhealthy forms of homosexuality and by dismissing the latter. In his Journal for 1918, Gide comes back to the arguments of Corydon (which has, at that point, only been published in a limited edition) in order to distinguish between ‘‘three types of homosexuals’’: ‘‘I call a pederast the man who, as the word indicates, falls in love with young boys. I call a sodomite . . . the man whose desire is addressed to mature men. I call an invert the man who, in the comedy of love, assumes the role of a woman and desires to be possessed.’’
He adds that the di√erence between the three is not always ‘‘distinct’’: ‘‘There are possible transferences from one to another; but most often the di√erence among them is such that they experience a profound disgust for one another, a disgust accompanied by a reprobation that in no way yields to that which you (heterosexuals) fiercely show toward all three.’’∞ To prove his point, to be
‘‘persuasive,’’ as he says, it is important to Gide to let heterosexuals know that pederasts, the noble and pure homosexuals, feel the same disgust for other, inverted homosexuals as do heterosexuals. A few lines earlier, he had called to mind the grandeur of pederasty: ‘‘Had Socrates and Plato not loved young men, what a pity for Greece, what a pity for the whole world! Had Socrates and Plato not loved young men and aimed to please them, each one of us would be a little less sensible’’ (2:246). It is easy to imagine why Proust, when he set out to give a somewhat scientific description of social reality and psychological life, would have been particularly attentive to making fun of those homosexuals who invoked Socrates in order to justify their own vice. If
t h e w i l l t o d i s t u r b
≤≤∑
Gide found Proust’s way of speaking of homosexuality in his books to be detestable and degrading, doubtless Proust also detested Gide’s way of trying to rehabilitate it, something he would have found, if not ridiculous then at the very least full of mystification.
Gide is perfectly willing to recognize that ‘‘homosexuals’’ have faults.
When he broaches this subject in Corydon, he has of course already excluded
‘‘certain degenerates, people who are sick and obsessed’’ (120). Yet even among ‘‘the others,’’ those he calls ‘‘normal pederasts,’’ certain weaknesses of character can be observed. Still, responsibility for these can be laid upon the situation in which they are obliged to live: ‘‘For the same thing always happens whenever a natural instinct is systematically thwarted. Yes, the state of our morality tends to make a homosexual inclination an academy of
hypocrisy, cunning, and disrespect for law’’ (120). If the normal pederast breaks laws, if he is hypocritical, it is due to the fact that his character has been shaped by the necessity to be forever hiding who he is. But it is not part of his deepest nature to be opposed to the law. Gide’s whole purpose throughout the book is to suggest precisely the contrary, that the normal pederast might well be the most attached to the laws of his land, to social progress, to the greatness of the nation.
When, in his Journal, he comments on Corydon, and distinguishes between
‘‘three kinds of homosexuals,’’ Gide places ‘‘inverts’’ in a special category: ‘‘It has always seemed to me that they alone deserved the reproach of moral or intellectual deformation and were subject to some of the accusations that are commonly addressed to all homosexuals’’ (2:247). Clearly then, Gide finds sexual inversion, the inversion of sexual roles, to be repugnant. Only masculine homosexuality is defensible. What is acceptable is that a grown man love younger men or that younger men love grown men. (So what Gide refers to as a sodomite is not someone who practices sodomy—actively or passively.
Rather he is a complement to the pederast, who loves younger men. If Gide’s ideological merry-go-round is to spin in balanced fashion, he needs a category for the younger man who is attracted to grown men.) Yet as soon as a sexual relation enters into the picture, especially if it includes passive sodomy, Gide is willing to countenance the accusations ‘‘commonly addressed’’
to homosexuals. That person who ‘‘assumes the role of a woman’’ during the sexual act proves particularly disgusting to Gide, even if the active role in sodomy is also quite upsetting to him.≤
≤≤∏
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f Gide repeated many times that in his case, sexual pleasure was to be
found in the form of caresses. Any idea of penetration was rigorously excluded. Gide’s sexuality is one of surfaces (‘‘superficial,’’ he wrote in one of the drafts for Corydon, with a heavy insistence on the fact that it should be perfectly clear what he meant by that). If he recognizes something of himself in Whitman, it is precisely because a simple bit of epidermal contact seems to su≈ce for the ‘‘comrades’’ that Whitman imagines in Calamus. Gide makes the connection himself in I
f It Die . . .: ‘‘As for myself, who can only conceive pleasure face to face, reciprocal and gentle and who, like Whitman, find satisfaction in the most furtive contact . . .’’≥
We know, thanks to the stories Gide himself tells in If It Die . . . ( just as we know thanks to Symonds’s Memoirs), to what an extent the apologetic drive to desexualize homosexuality in order to make it more acceptable, the drive which finds expression in Corydon, participates in a project of mystification, even self-mystification. After all, even if he did not practice sodomy (which, active or passive, does really seem to have filled him with repugnance), it cannot be said that his ‘‘contacts’’ with the male youths of Biskra, for example, fit well into the chaste and purely pedagogical framework described by the Platonic doctor in Gide’s dialogues on Greek love. The most that can be said is that we see here evidence of the radical dissociation that Gide was always striving to establish between physical sensuality and love. He once observed, ‘‘No doubt I already felt that fundamental incapacity for mixing the spirit with the senses, which is, I believe, somewhat peculiar to me, and which was soon to become one of the cardinal repulsions of my life.’’∂ Still, is it possible to believe, to take only the most obvious example, that he never had any sexual relations with Marc Allégret?∑
Gide would insist on the distinction between inversion and pederasty
through the end of his life. He takes it up again, for instance, in So Be It, written shortly before his death in 1951:
The great number of confidences I have been in a position to receive
has convinced me that the variety of cases of homosexuality is much
greater than that of cases of heterosexuality. And, furthermore, the
irrepressible loathing a homosexual may feel for another whose ap-
petites are not the same as his is something of which the heterosexual has no idea; he lumps them all together so as to be able to throw them
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 32